thought about him as somebody who can fix almost anything. But what happens when he comes up against something he can’t fix, like marriage?” It eventually becomes clear to the audience that Mitzi is having an affair with Burt’s best friend Bennie (Seth Rogen), but it remains unclear how much, if at all, her husband knows. He keeps a lot of thoughts and feelings inside, exhibiting a familiar fatherly stoicism. “We’re talking about some- body who had immigrant parents coming out of the Depression, served in World War II, and was seeking the American dream as a company man of the highest order.There’s a very American man at the center of that charac- ter.” Although some of Burt’s intentions and emotions remain ambiguous, Dano had to know them for himself, “I try to be specific about the arc of the character in the script and how we keep layering and revealing. I had to figure out what he is choosing not to see, or not to know, or what he can’t accept. I think his dad sort of fell on the sword by the end of it for the sake
of the family and to try to mitigate the damage.” The director provided Dano with photographs and other materials that helped them answer these questions for themselves. “You’re always kind of poking around [the archive] and you take all those resources, and you study them, and try to put them into your body, somatize them in some way, shape, or form,” Dano says. Pre-vaccinations, Dano and Spielberg first met over Zoom. Dano had wrapped The Batman , and he and his partner Kazan had been using the free time to parent without a nanny and keep writing hours, or “living the best pandemic life we could.”Thinking back, he recalls, “From the first meeting, which I was really nervous about, he was very open, vulnerable, and emotionally intelligent, which opened the door for me to see he had a lot at stake here. I think his dad had only passed eight months before. As we got closer to filming, more memories would come to Steven. So the more we dug in, the more stuff there was coming out of him. In a
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